Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film by Darryl Jones (review)

Abstract

806 Reviews lucid and fleetingphotographs of the postmodern reduction of reality to simulacrum. Sarah Hirschmuller surveys the continuing relevance of Howard Baker's challenging assessments of historical crimes. The theme of institutional and ideological violence is continued by Elisabeth Angel-Perez in her analysis of Martin Crimp's autotelic The Treatment and Attempts on her Life. While different from the politically committed drama of the 1970s, this drama might, as Lanteri argues in his introduction, herald a renewal of political theatre through its concern with new issues, with deconstructing meaning, and questioning institutions. In Caryl Churchill, social critique is suggested through Brechtian techniques of overt theatricality and satire. Satire also characterizes the work of Gregory Motton, which challenges dominant ideology and traditional theatre. Nathalie Hourmant le Bever explores the subversive nature of Steven Berkoff's carnivalesque theatre, while the utopian theatre of David Greig, with its focus on the collapse of the grand narratives and the problematizationof communication, may contain a profound underlying political message, as Dan Rebellato suggests convincingly. A similar mes? sage, although deeply sceptical and pessimistic, can also be read in Jim Cartwright's plays. This is a very readable book which gives a sense of how, in Lanteri's words, the modernity of British theatre 'inscribes the apocalyptic issues ofthe end ofthe millenniumin infinitelyvaried and rich forms' (p. 16). This catastrophic view of the world is echoed by the fragmentation of theatrical forms, suggesting new areas of exploration and debate about British theatre in the twenty-firstcentury. University of Leicester Nicole Fayard Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. By Darryl Jones. London: Arnold. 2003. iv + 22opp. ?35 (pbk ?9.99). ISBN 0-340-76252-7 (pbk 0-340-762535 ). Darryl Jones's Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film fails between a number of critical categories. It is located between literary and filmstudies, it simultaneously addresses both scholar and fan ofthe horror genre (though as Jones proves through his own example, these viewing/reading categories might not be so easily distinguishable), and, as a critical history of the themes of Gothic horror, it is both insightful and somewhat disappointing at the same time. The book is eloquently written and should be accessible to students from undergraduate level onwards. Jones structures an analysis of many of the canonical literary and filmic horror texts around a series of themes (transgression and censorship; reli? gion and nationalism; science and technology; vampires; madness; texts, documents, and metafictions; fears of disease and invasion; metamorphosis and body horror; and Satanism and the occult), a structure which is original in its design and which offersa series of disparate texts a sense of coherence. It is in this structure that the book finds its strength, moving, for example, from Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu cycle, via M. R. James and his adapters, through Stephen King to The Blair Witch Project (1999), making connections which are sensible and often taken for granted in other analyses of the horror genre. This book will be an invaluable resource for those wishing to place horror literature within its broader cultural context, or those who teach and study the horror film, in that it offersthe reader a genealogy of the classic tropes of horror fictionwhich starts beyond Edison's cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein in 1910. However, there are several flaws in this study which will be particularly conspicuous to a reader coming from the field of film studies. While the author has an extensive MLRy 100.3, 2??5 807 knowledge of the US horror film, and he writes with confidence about films from a wide range of cinematic eras and subgenres, Jones's analysis of these texts is more flimsythan his literary analysis, with some of the filmsections in the book appearing rather indexical. This renders the book methodologically uneven, given that the critical histories offeredofeach trope ofhorror literatureare so thoroughly researched. This study often glosses over the industrial contexts of production of the horror film (aside from occasional 'fan fact' anecdotes) and very little attention is paid to the specific detail of mise en scene within the horror genre, concentrating instead on plot and dialogue in...